Lewis H. Lapham believes...a look at Lapham's Quarterly and its Religion issue

by Peter Menkin

This article is neither criticism nor answer, but report and commentary. In its way, the writer hopes to do a little bit of introduction about Lapham’s Quarterly, a most interesting and highbrow quarterly magazine. In its way, the writer hopes to do a little bit of introduction about the distinguished American editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis H. Lapham. Mostly, the work here is helpful in talking about what is a Christian, on this Easter Day, asking at the very beginning need one be a member of a Church, a Baptized individual, or even other than self-defined and contained as a culturally introduced member of the faith who is formed by need and self-definition: for that is our editor in question, the well-known Lewis H. Lapham who describes himself in his introductory essay to the issue on Religion, dated Winter 2010 of the magazine quarterly and labeled “Preamble.”

A catchy and short teaser on the website where this so well done and very excellent bit of writing and more so also memoire of intelligent thought, not to over-gild the description too much, goes:

“God, gods, and the people who love them populate our issue on religion—from ancient oracles to modern scientists still full of questions.”

Fortunately, for this writer, who remains full of wonder and questions on these matters of God, Christianity and Faith, my Easter judgment is that Lewis H.Lapham is really a Christian. Recently, in an attempt to engage Mr. Lapham by phone in the foundation office where he can sometimes be found these days, the very brief conversation ended with an answer to my request for some words about religion and even an interview, were given the serious reply, I’m not interested in Religion. Now, the capitalization of the word “religion,” is mine, but it was said in a way that belied any silliness regarding the subject, yet seemed a little odd since he’d dedicated an entire issue of his quarterly to the topics: Albert Einstein, de Tocqueville, The Law (Algeria, 1377), Flannery O’Connor Presents a Prophet, Let not the Demons dance, God Hides His Face (1942 Warsaw), Clad in Gold of Spotless White (1905, United States of America) and so many others, many of which are available on the web site of the quarterly here.

Let us agree, Mr. Lapham has made an American statement about Religion in his Preamble. I think you will agree. Let us agree, Mr. Lapham has made an American statement about his own sense of Christianity that introduces a kind of freedom from organized religion and Baptism itself that seems part of a new world hopefulness. Granted, most of us will think his self-ordained faith not connect so well to God’s methods since it is individual and without seeming community of fellow Christians.

But this writer who is Christian by most definitions, even by the kind of wish Mr. Lapham offers the faith, thinks the maker of this kind of idea which is ascribed to Mr. Lapham needs to be brought into the fold more closely for fellowship. Let us extend a hand to those who are not part of a Church, admit God works in strange ways, and that his ways are not our ways. 

Let us be more than hopeful, let us not be some kind of Universalist, but let those of us who are a part of organized Christianity continue in the work of being a light to the world and to others in our world. Hence, let us in this article of commentary and report believe. Not to be glib about things, or let Mr. Lapham know we indulge his faith, but for the sake of our own souls and our own faith in Jesus Christ and our own Christian Church. That is really what makes what I read of this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and even the goodness of its publication prevail.

Not to confuse the reader, the Preamble also has this title: Mandates of Heaven: by Lewis H. Lapham . A quote begins the essay and sets its tone: What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image. —Daniel J. Boorstin .

What interested me more about this 75 year old emeritus Editor of Harper’s magazine, the USA’s longest, continually published magazine of letters, is this Facebook quote: Tracy Herz Lewis Lapham has a place in my mind--perhaps even my heart--forever. What a legacy he has left with his work. What a true gentleman. But I continue to be curious about this: He studied under C.S. Lewis in the 1950s at Oxford. I would very much like to know more about this part of his life and his impressions.

The answer to Tracy Herz’s interesting question, is really what is Mr. Lapham’s work and this quotation helps set in ones mind a clear answer he gave to the subject: "I know of no task more difficult, but it is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader- the writer's labor turned to the wheel of the reader's imagination- that produces the freedoms of mind from which a society gathers its common stores of energy and hope."
~Lewis Lapham

I have left out something from the list of articles in the issue on Religion, and here it is in entirety…Resurrection, (1623, London):

John Donne

Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris, by these straits to die,

I joy, that in these straits I see my west;
For, though their currents yield return to none,
What shall my west hurt me? As west and east
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.

Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Ham, or Shem.

We think that paradise and Calvary,
Christ’s cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.

So, in his purple wrapp’d, receive me, Lord;
By these his thorns, give me his other crown;
And as to others’ souls I preach’d thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
“Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down.”

Let us focus more on Mr. Lapham’s Preamble and his statement of Faith through Christianity. He explains, I came to my early acquaintance with the Bible in company with my first readings of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Bulfinch’s Mythology, but as an unbaptized child raised in a family unaffiliated with the teachings of a church, I missed the explanation as to why the stories about Moses and Jesus were to be taken as true while those about Apollo and Rumpelstiltskin were not.

In describing his college years at Yale, he writes that the classroom was mostly Apostate. But he does explain quite fully that its prime religious character was Christian. Let us entertain ourselves for a moment with a long, entertaining quote from his introduction to the quarterly about Religion:

Four years at Yale College in the 1950s rendered the question moot. It wasn’t that I’d missed the explanation; there was no explanation to miss, at least not one accessible by means other than the proverbial leap of faith. Then as now, the college was heavily invested in the proceeds of the Protestant Reformation, the testimony of God’s will being done present in the stonework of Harkness Tower and the cautionary ringing of its bells, as well as in the readings from scripture in Battell Chapel and the petitionings of Providence prior to the Harvard game. The college had been established in 1701 to bring a great light unto the gentiles in the Connecticut wilderness, the mission still extant 250 years later in the assigned study of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons and John Donne’s verse. Nowhere in the texts did I see anything other than words on paper—very beautiful words but not the living presence to which they alluded in rhyme royal and iambic pentameter. I attributed the failure to the weakness of my imagination and my poor performance at both the pole vault and the long jump.

In a few letters via email to Mr. Lapham at his Lapham’s Quarterly address, this writer tried to interest Mr. Lapham in answering a series of questions about Religion, with the kind of honesty that implied, here, you are not so interested in Religion for your personal life, but call youself Christian, anyway. So let me lead you a little, criticize you a little, and while provoking you with what are hoped to be probing and interesting questions to you, help our readers find out more about your own faith beliefs. This is a quote from one of those emails from me at my home in Mill Valley where I work to Mr. Lapham’s office in New York City, where I believe it is that city where he finds his home:

I was thinking today again about the illuminated nature of The Bible, and wondered two things: Is this the work of man inspired and directed by God, or is it the inspired work of man for mankind without the God element? Also, can great literature, wonderful writing itself, come to writers without some kind of divine inspiration to guide or aid it in its creation? Is there work that you consider so inspired as to be Divine with the capital D, or without?  Will you tell us something of this kind of work with words that explains genius? Even Religious Genius, as Saint Paul is said to have held and evidenced in his work and his writing.

In your life as a man of letters, and a man who is an observer of the world’s practices, have you ever seen evidence or heard someone tell you that there is a greater force, a God, a higher power, working with human kind? I am sure having read some of your writing and listened to an interview or two on Religion you’ve given, you’ve had more than doubts alone. The question asks, did you enter into the Spirit, or did you have times and moments of Faith in Christ or interest in religion that went beyond the worldly? You said in one interview or article that you rarely went to Church, even as a child since your parents were not interested in Religion as a practice and what you did Observe in the Religious life was weddings and funerals. When it comes to weddings, can you see how the joining of man and woman in Christ is also like the Church’s bond of Faith in Christ, as Christ being the head of the Church? Was this evidenced in weddings to you, and if not this, what was evidenced in the Christian marriage ceremony?

So many times the promise of everlasting life is part of some Communion are also getting on in years think of when they think of death. It comes to all of us, do you not agree? What are your thoughts on death, and has end of life come to mind for you from time to time?

He did not respond to my questions, written prior to the writing of this piece by me, and also he did suggest I go another route, responding on February 4, 2011:

Peter,

The 2010 winter issue of Lapham's Quarterly (Volume III, Number I) addresses the topic of Religion.  You might want to look at it.

Lewis

I couldn’t have been more delighted and later he said I could quote at length from time to time in this article from his Preamble:

So this is one choice, for it gives one a taste of the kind of cynicism a journalist, regardless of caliber, seems to employ for reasons that I think the attitude arrives in the journalist’s life as a result of so many disappointing and difficult evils of the world. I know this is certainly not Christian hope. He does not engage in Christian hope. He engages in a kind of worldliness which one would think the norm for the kind of work he does, but surprisingly, now turned on faith and matters related to Christ and I think even his Church as not matter of habit but by vision and perspective of the world, and heaven, too:

The fact of God’s life apparently as unverifiable as the proof of his death, I reached the conclusion suggested by the French philosopher Michel Onfray that “God is neither dead nor dying because he is not mortal”—the story about the blessed Virgin in the manger with the three Magi therefore made of the same cloud-capped stuff as the story about Goldilocks in the forest with the three bears. Onfray observes that “a fiction does not die, an illusion never passes away,” situating Yahweh, together with Ulysses, Allah, Lancelot of the Lake, and Gitche Manitou, among the immortals sustained on the life-support systems of poetry and the high approval ratings awarded to magicians pulling rabbits out of hats.

Haven’t we all learned a great deal from Doubting Thomas. There is much to offer in Mr. Lapham’s essay. That is, if one can get over shock, distaste, or even anger regarding his stance. This writer did, for knowing that this did not show a kind of hate, but evidence of an inquiring mind that the man who owned it did not consider atheist in main but Christian at heart. I almost asked on reading this section, What comes here now?

One theme of the writer and editor Lewis H. Lapham has been the public good. And so many Religion Writers today look on faith and matters of various Church and Church people as they play out the public good, implying and always looking for that hypocrisy which the press loves to pillory Religion and Clergy. Is not Roman Catholic acts of child molesting a wonderful story for the press in general, and an excellent example of the hypocritical way that Religion in our modern world fails and even harms the personal and public good. Let’s look at Mr. Lapham’s wonderful definition of Religion in our 21^st Century serving the public good, if at all:

Religion hadn’t lost its capacity to bestow, again according to Breckman, “the consoling message of cosmic meaning and personal redemption,” to comfort countless numbers of its adherents afraid of death and acquainted with grief, to illuminate the masterpieces of Chartres Cathedral and the Mass in B Minor, to introduce Gerard Manley Hopkins to the power and glory of “chestnut-falls and finches’ wings,” to restore in Leo Tolstoy “the joy of being,” but it had been relieved of its character as a public menace. Henceforth religion was to be understood as a private good, available in cloaks of many colors; it no longer had anything to do with the day-to-day operations of a world subject to the laws of physics and the rule of reason.

At 75, our subject of this kind of commentary and report on Mr. Lapham’s Preamble to his Religion issue begins to turn to more of a memoire and even more a kind of dialogue with faith. We find again something about the man as writer in his style and approach, and we find again some illuminations of our modern 21^st Century faith issues, even those of the 20^th Century as Mr. Lapham gives us a kind of personable look in his reportorial manner of observations and a long life lived:

Not that I encountered, at least not in New York or Washington or Los Angeles, large numbers of people leading lives in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount. Poolside in Beverly Hills the name of the Lord seldom came up in conversation unless it was being taken in vain. “The hunger and thirst for righteousness” was notably absent from both the character and policy of the Nixon administration. Neither the poor nor the meek were inheriting estates in Westchester County. None of the Las Vegas hotels listed prompt medical attention as one of the finer amenities available to guests disposing of their right hands and plucking out their right eyes.

The wanderings away from the road to Damascus I took to be confirmations of the secular narrative bound up in the diploma from Yale, further proofs during the decade of the 1970s that although the Christian pieties remained securely in place on the pediment of the Supreme Court, on the table with the coffee at White House prayer breakfasts, acknowledged in absentia at Hollywood weddings, the spiritual infrastructure was beginning to show signs of disrepair—if not at the Iowa State Fair, certainly at the cineplex in downtown Des Moines. My travels seldom took me anywhere except to California or Europe, but if sometimes in an airport bar I ran across a third-generation Baptist, I avoided the embarrassment of a conversation about the Second Coming in much the same way that I’d learned to withhold comment when asked by an author for an opinion of his unintelligibly avant-garde off-Broadway play.

I still believe that there is a kind of viewpoint shown here that demonstrates a sense of disappointment, to say the least, about our world in the 20^th Century, and even this the 21^st. Is such Pessimism with its capital P necessary, and is it a characteristic of despair and a kind of brooding that also for years characterized Harper’s magazine from time to time under Mr.Lapham’s editorship. This writer enjoyed the magazine for many years, mostly because it is as so many have said a fine literary magazine. This writer was glad to be associated with Mr. Lapham in even a modest capacity and that magazine as a Contributing Editor so many years ago during a very dry and difficult period of in his own life. But there is a kind of freedom in being an Emeritus Editor and having your own creation again in retirement years, if these are Mr. Lapham’s retirement years. For Mr. Lapham is a kind of mystique unto himself, but more than mystique, he is real and it is his writing that shows the kind of genuiness that he hails and holds, despite the disappointment his work thematic develops in his own statement of being a Christian—in an essay of worldview that today we’d call an editor’s way of transparency of viewpoint:

More than one essay in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly regards the secularization of the old religious festivals as a fait accompli. The toxic levels of fear and superstition lowering the air quality in the news and entertainment media—in the nominally nondenominational sectors of cyberspace as well as those under ecclesiastical obligation—suggest otherwise. If large provinces of meaning have been lost to the mandate of the three wrathful monotheisms, so also the master narrative of mid-twentieth-century American social science has depleted its resources of relevance and romance.

As this article turns towards its ending, another quotation from Lapham’s Quarterly website, the proverbial “About Us.”

Each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly adopts and explores a single theme. Our first four issues were dedicated, respectively, to War, Money, Nature, and Education, each created with an aim to help readers find historical threads from Homer to Queen Elizabeth I to George Patton, from Aesop to Edith Wharton to Joan Didion. New essays from writers such as Stanley Fish, Fritz Stern, and Andrew Delbanco then knotted each theme together. A typical issue features an introductory Preamble from Editor Lewis H. Lapham; approximately 100 “Voices in Time” — that is, appropriately themed selections drawn from the annals and archives of the past — and newly commissioned commentary and criticism from today’s preeminent scholars and writers. Myriad photographs, paintings, charts, graphs, and maps round out each issue’s 224 pages... continue

As a kind of ending, and I say a “kind of ending” to this commentary and report, I note once again a magazine under Mr. Lapham’s hand is coming to a national recognition through award. Now nominated for an American National Magazine award: We could not be more pleased to announce that Lapham's Quarterly has been nominated for its first ever National Magazine Award for our 2010 issues "Religion," "Arts & Letters," and "The City."

LQ is nominated alongside The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, and The Sun in the category "literary, political, and professional magazines." For the complete listing of finalists, and an extended list of those nominated, click here.

This writer is disappointed Mr. Lapham would not be interviewed for this commentary and report. Here is the last question on a list of questions not replied to and turned down by the editor of Lapham’s Quarterly because Religion does not interest him:

If we can do a two part interview, I’ll go to half hour sessions of about 5 or 6 questions each. I know you like to write long, and suspect you have a lot to say on the subject. Lewis Lapham talks about God, Man and Faith. Also, is there an afterlife. I want to know about heaven, too, for after all mortality is a theme of yours and at your age, like mine, too, it is inevitable to have…that life ends in death.

I’ll try not to nail you with, Is there a Cross, and is that Cross found in the individual lives of men? Can faith be driven by cynicism, and where springs faith if not in belief of Christ? What is the most attractive thing about Church and the worship service when attending Communion? Some thoughts and starting points for thinking about an interview were addressed in this email letter.

This article originally appeared Easter 2011, Church of England Newspaper, London.

To know something about God
With apologies to the hymn of the Syriac Church,
by Peter Menkin, Obl Cam OSB

So much grief to learn/
Christ died and descended/
into hell./
The vigil of Saturday/
Goes on. Imagination and/
faith follows the journey.//

He is alone in the tomb,/
cold to touch./
Yet He continues.//

May we with Him./
He showed us God,/
when heard them cry,/
"Take pity on us."//

Death held no hold on Him./
He traced his name on their heads,/
those in darkness and fetters./
They belong to him.

Christ Suffering -- Chapel,
Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, CA
photo by Linda Shirado

Book Review: 'Echoes from Calvary,' excellent meditation for Good Friday

by Peter Menkin

This was a timely review when I first wrote it in 2005:

I found “Echoes from Calvary” by way of an article in The San Francisco Chronicle by a writer named Peter Steinfels under the label “Beliefs.” It says as headline, “Haydn’s music on Christ’s last words, a transforming journey from concert hall to sacred setting.” The book is a text of meditations and is titled “Echoes from Calvary: Meditations on Franz Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ.” This lovely book has 2 CDs, the complete performance with the spoken word and one CD with music only. One intriguing part of the book is the first which goes through the musical and spiritual journey of the man who put all this together, a musician named Richard Young.

Now I think this is a heavy kind of reading, for it is a Good Friday text–so why at Easter time. That’s when I read it. I am interested in the resurrection, from a religious viewpoint, and of course the entry way is Holy Week and Good Friday. There you have my reason.

Richard Young’s spiritual journey is very well done and interesting, as a kind of personal statement that has worthwhile reflection. It sounds like it should. As for the Easter part, there is a hopeful dimension to this book, and I am finding it sometimes dark and sometimes light. I find myself reflecting on the words as they are offered in the homily like meditations. The first CD has meditations by Martin Luther King Jr., Martin E. Marty, Raymond E. Brown, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Grover A. Zinn, Andrew M. Greeley, Peter J. Gomes and others.

There is an evident fact of the work. One cannot help but be moved by both the divinity of Christ and the human nature of the man. This is a respectful book, as one might expect and I think it is full of hope. These are meditations of the heart for Good Friday and Holy Week. Through the music and the text of meditations, one follows the Christ and knows something of his spirit. It is also a good exercise or series of examples of meditations by different writers who are clergy, giving one a taste of their own depths with each of the last words.

The words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “Surely, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” “Woman, behold your son!” “Behold your mother!” “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” “I thirst.” “It is finished!” “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And some meditations on “The Earthquake.”

Richard Young carries his theme of words and music even further than one would expect, and happily so for this reader. (I am not well educated when it comes to music, but I found his study understandable and helpful. Even inspiring to a non music person.) At the end of the book, in an educational and instructive way that interacts with listening to Haydn, he writes of the music only, and there is a CD with only the music for his very purposes. I want to recommend this lovely book, with its elegant layout and design, to anyone interested in meditations on the last words of Christ, or wanting to come closer to knowing this man Jesus who is divine–a book for Christians.


This review recently appeared in Church of England Newspaper, London (one week prior to Holy Week 2011).

Book Review: Joseph Ratzinger's new book on the Gospel exonerating Jews--includes excerpt

by Peter Menkin

Pope Benedict XVI has written a new book, the second in a series of three signed and authored under the Pope’s name Joseph
Ratzinger. The work is now on The New York Times Best Seller list, and his previous title sold 3 million copies.

Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, founder and editor of the publishing house, says that 300,000 copies were published in Italy, 200,000 in Germany, and 120,000 in France.

Joseph Ratzinger and Father Fessio

The study guide for Joseph Ratziner’s book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, published by Ignatius Press, will be available from Ignatius Press on March 30th. It includes chapter summaries and outlines, a list of key terms, a glossary, and a section for readers to write down their personal reflections as they read the book. The book was published March 10, 2011 in eight languages – including German, Italian, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Polish.

The book has been published in English by Ignatius Press, The Catholic Truth Society (United Kingdom/Ireland), Paulines Publication (Africa), Freedom Publishing (Australia), and Asia Trading Corporation (Asia)..

The assertion that the study of the Gospels make, among others, is that the Jewish people are not complicit in the killing of Christ. A closer look at the book is found here: Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week – From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection at www.jesusofnazareth2.com, or become a Facebook fan at www.facebook.com/jesusofnazareth2

“It’s clear that what interests the Holy Father is helping people to know and love someone whom he knows and loves,” says Father Fessio. “But he does this as a scholar. This book is a bright star in the constellation of books about Jesus.” And many scholars have responded with praise for the book, noting its unique combination of complexity, clarity, breadth of learning, and depth of theological insight. The Catholic News Service is the source of the Father Fessio quote above, though the website for the book is source for the remarks introduced below.

For a theological and interpretive look at the new book, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, remarks at length:

 For John, the accusers were “simply ‘the Jews’”. But Benedict shows that in John’s Gospel that designation has a “precise and clearly defined meaning”, i.e. the Temple aristocracy, not the Jewish people as an undifferentiated whole.

  In Mark, there is a widening of the circle of accusers: the “ochlos”, the crowd, “the masses”. But Benedict points out that the crowd was mainly comprised of sympathizers of Barabbas, who wanted the customary amnesty to be granted to him. The followers of Jesus “remained hidden out of fear”. This crowd, therefore, does not represent the attitude or the actions of the Jewish people with respect to Jesus.

 In Matthew, the “whole people” say: “His blood be upon us and on our children”, the famous “blood vengeance”. Here Benedict makes three incisive comments:

 At this time of your most solemn celebration, I feel particularly close, precisely because of what “Nostra Aetate” calls Christians to remember always: that the church “received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy concluded the ancient covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the gentiles” (“Nostra Aetate,” 4). In addressing myself to you I wish to reaffirm the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on Catholic-Jewish relations and reiterate the church’s commitment to the dialogue that in the past 40 years has fundamentally changed our relationship for the better.

Because of that growth in trust and friendship, Christians and Jews can rejoice together in the deep spiritual ethos of the Passover, a memorial (“zikkaron”) of freedom and redemption. Each year, when we listen to the Passover story we return to that blessed night of liberation. This holy time of the year should be a call to both our communities to pursue justice, mercy, solidarity with the stranger in the land, with the widow and orphan, as Moses commanded: “But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this” (Dt 24:18)…

… In my heart I repeat with you the psalm of the paschal “Hallel” (Ps 118:1-4), invoking abundant divine blessings upon you: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever. Let Israel say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’ … Let those who fear the Lord say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’“
 

It is apparent that this work, the new book about The Gospels, is remarkable and destined to be popular work about Jesus Christ, and for Catholic-Jewish relations offers another new date in continuing conversation towards closer friendship and even understanding. Certainly, it makes a claim that Jews in this modern world will find acceptable and by most, welcomed. But who is the Press who published Joseph Ratzinger’s book, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week – From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection? This is the official remark from their website:

Ignatius Press is among the largest U.S. publishers and distributors of Catholic books, magazines, videos, DVDs, and music. It is the primary English-language publisher of Pope Benedict XVI’s books. Ignatius Press publishes a wide-range of works, including popular, best-selling titles; major spiritual and theological works; works of philosophy and Christian literature; and English translations of contemporary European theologians. It also publishes the magazines “Catholic World Report” and “Homiletic and Pastoral Review.” Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio founded Ignatius Press in 1978. A former pupil of Pope Benedict XVI, Father Fessio says the objective of Ignatius Press is “to support the teachings of the Church.” Ignatius Press is named for St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order. The Catholic publishing house is based in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit the Ignatius Press website at www.Ignatius.com

  

At one point this writer was curious enough to make inquiry of what the nazi hunters, terrorism fighters, and organized fighters of antisemitism, The Simon Weisenthal Center thought of the book by Joseph Ratzinger. Would not they welcome this statement as a kind of move towards reconciliation. When contacting the organization, this writer learned that members of the organization Simon Wiesenthal Center (Los Angeles-New York City) had met the Pope on two occasions. Once in the United States.  Once at the Vatican. With good fortune, Simon Wiesenthal Center offered an interview with Mark Wietzman, current Governmenta Affairs man, a man devoted in his lifetime to working to end anti-semitism and familiar with Catholic-Jewish Relations. This American, who is an observant Jew, agreed to an interview during a phone call while in a cab going to the airport in New York City on his way to Prague. Later, he spoke by phone from his home in New York State with this writer on a Sunday morning about his meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, and shares with this writer and readers observations and opinions on Catholic-Jewish relations. The interview:

Where was the meeting?…
Jewish leaders who were invited to meet the Pope: It was in Washington, D.C. on the grounds of the Catholic Center. There was a day for a larger inter-religious meeting and there was a breakoff to meet with an individual Jewish group itself. (April 17, 2008 at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center.)

Mark Weitzman who before U.S. Congress testified on terrorism shown on Charlie Rose Show

 Can you tell us what feelings or impressions you had of the Pope?…
 I think for myself there were a couple of feelings: There was a tremendous feeling for the office. For the leader of the world’s Catholics there is certain grandeur about that. I was interested in observing how we reacted in the history of Jewish Catholic Relations. To get a certain sense of the man himself: The religious, the political and the human aspects…
I was interested in observing how he reacted to the history of Jewish Catholic Relations and how he was going to address that.  All of these aspects embodied in this one individual who bears so much responsibility and who stands as the leader of one the world’s great religions..
 Was there a holiness or luminescence about the man, or something special?…

 I think that is very difficult…I think that is a judgment that [there is] a divine in the human capacity. The Jewish belief is that we are all created in the divine image. We did have a sense of a combination of both intellectual and spiritual attributes that came across.

I did feel that the man had dedicated himself wholly and whole heartedly to the [religious life]. I went in with [the sense offered in writings by] all the press that describes his austere intellectual, theological side of him as dominating. What impressed me was his humanity. That was a wonderful thing, [especially] in light of all the reports. He was warm, benevolent.
 The Pope certainly impressed me as a man who tried to serve as a bridge to bring the spiritual into the world. We did have a sense of a combination of both great intellectual and spiritual attributes that came across from the Pope.
 In a nutshell, what is your opinion of his Gospel account where Jews are held differently than previously known in the popular Roman Catholic (and some say Christian) mind, that Jews are not complicit in the killing of Jesus?…
 It was an act of strong courage and boldness. It enlarged upon Nostra Aetate. It was an act of strong courage and boldness. It enlarged upon Nostra Aetate.  In recent years there was an issue of a schismatic group (the Society of Saint Pius X) who had a leading member (Bishop Richard Williamson) who publicly questioned the Holocaust.
This group has a history of rejecting the Second Vatican Council, and all the reforms that came from it, which include the repudiation of the deicide charge against Jews. Right now there are negotiations between the Vatican and this group, aimed at bringing them back into the Church. The Pope’s new statement is a clear affirmation and enlargement upon Nostra Aetate. To me it is emphatically saying that the acceptance of Nostra Aetate and its succeeding teachings is a bedrock of the Church’s theology, that Pope Benedict will not accept turning back the clock and reinstalling the old “teachings of contempt” that led to generations of Christian antisemitism.
In the sense that there is a characteristic of relationship called Charism of Friendship, did the Pope indicate or offer that to your contingent and the Jewish Community? (Charism of friendship as meaning special warmth.)…
I very much felt that the Pope was trying to indicate this special relationship with the Jewish people. And, it was a very welcome and needed message, for at the same time as this meeting there was the issue of the negotiations with the group above as well as some other instances that led Jews to wonder somewhat about the Church’s commitment to this issue.

But I felt that it went beyond any political message…I’m sure there was diplomatic concern. But I felt it went beyond that. It was important to the Pope personally. I think he went out of his way to be sure we understood that.


Will you take a moment and remark specifically on the Pope’s new book?…
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit who writes frequently about spirituality, said the Pope’s new book was a “ringing reaffirmation” of Nostra Aetate, which was passed during the Second Vatican Council, with the pope putting his “personal stamp on it in a way that’s irrefutable.”
In a paper that I gave at a conference at Yale last summer, I wrote that “If baptism was once for Jews the ticket to admission to Western society as Heinrich Heine famously put it, then acceptance of Vatican II, including the rejection of Catholic antisemitism and the acceptance of religious liberty, must be the price of admission for these groups into today’s church.”
By his words Pope Benedict has made it clear that he, and the Catholic Church, is still firmly and irrevocably committed to the rejection of the ancient charge of deicide, which was the basis for centuries of antisemitism. He has sent a strong message to those who still cling to that ancient prejudice that such beliefs have no place in today’s church, and he has thus pointed the way to the continued growth of the positive relationship between Catholics and Jews.

In an opinion piece published in The Forward (Published March 09, 2011, issue of March 18, 2011), Eugene Korn says about Catholic intensions, in specific this Pope’s sense of converting the Jews to Christianity:

“Meanwhile, in passages so far overlooked by Jewish commentators, Benedict sensitively touches upon a major problem that has plagued Catholic-Jewish relations all throughout history: converting Jews. This topic has been the focus of considerable discord in Catholic-Jewish relations in recent years. In 2008, Benedict upset many Jews with his reauthorization of the Latin Mass containing a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. And in 2009, a statement by American Catholic Bishops endorsing the evangelization of Jews nearly destroyed their interfaith dialogue. (The bishops later retracted the offending claim.)

“As a theological conservative, Benedict has written previously that the Jewish covenant at Sinai has been superseded. But his supersessionism has always been focused on the end of time, and he has maintained that Jewish unification with the church is “hardly possible, and perhaps not even desirable before the eschaton.” In his latest book, he expands this idea, insisting that for now “Israel retains its own mission” and that saving Israel “is in the hands of God” — meaning, presumably, not in the hands of Christian missionaries. Had Christians followed this doctrine throughout the millennia, less Jewish blood would have ran in the streets, and Jews would have been freer to practice their faith with dignity.

“Benedict’s expectation of the future acceptance of Christian faith by everyone takes the practical threat out of Christian supersessionism for Jews today. And if some Jews still object to his eschatological supersessionism, they should remember that it is not far from what most traditional Jews believe will occur in the “end of days,” when gentiles will accept Judaism’s God and, as Jews proclaim regularly in our Aleinu prayer, “In that day, the Lord will be One and His name One.”

“Benedict has chosen to stress these teachings not because of Jewish pressure nor to be politically correct. He wrote the book for Catholics around the world, not to win Jewish minds and hearts. Evidently Benedict understands that purging the New Testament and Catholic thinking of all traces of the Adversus Judaeos motifs so prevalent in early and medieval Christian theology is essential if he is to purify the faith of Christian believers. This makes the most recent installment of “Jesus of Nazareth” an all the more important and impressive work.”

(Rabbi Eugene Korn is American director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation in Efrat and Jerusalem and editor of Meorot: A Forum of Modern Orthodox Discourse.)





ADDENDUM

Excerpt from the book, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week – From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection:

Book

Jesus before Pilate

Jesus’ interrogation before the Sanhedrin had concluded in the way Caiaphas had expected: Jesus was found guilty of blasphemy, for which the penalty was death. But since only the Romans could carry out the death sentence, the case now had to be brought before Pilate and the political dimension of the guilty verdict had to be emphasized. Jesus had declared himself to be the Messiah; hence he had laid claim to the dignity of kingship, albeit in a way peculiarly his own. The claim to Messianic kingship was a political offense, one that had to be punished by Roman justice. With cockcrow, daybreak had arrived. The Roman Governor used to hold court early in the morning.

So Jesus is now led by his accusers to the praetorium and is presented to Pilate as a criminal who deserves to die. It is the “day of preparation” for the Passover feast. The lambs are slaughtered in the afternoon for the evening meal. Hence cultic purity must be preserved; so the priestly accusers may not enter the Gentile praetorium, and they negotiate with the Roman Governor outside the building. John, who provides this detail (18:28–29), thereby highlights the contradiction between the scrupulous attitude to regulations for cultic purity and the question of real inner purity: it simply does not occur to Jesus’ accusers that impurity does not come from entering a Gentile house, but rather from the inner disposition of the heart. At the same time the evangelist emphasizes that the Passover meal had not yet taken place and that the slaughter of the lambs was still to come.

In all essentials, the four Gospels harmonize with one another in their accounts of the progress of the trial. Only John reports the conversation between Jesus and Pilate, in which the question about Jesus’ kingship, the reason for his death, is explored in depth (18:33–38). The historicity of this tradition is of course contested by exegetes. While Charles H. Dodd and Raymond E. Brown judge it positively, Charles K. Barrett is extremely critical: “John’s additions and alterations do not inspire confidence in his historical reliability” (The Gospel according to Saint John, p. 530). Certainly no one would claim that John set out to provide anything resembling a transcript of the trial. Yet we may assume that he was able to explain with great precision the core question at issue and that he presents us with a true account of the trial. Barrett also says “that John has with keen insight picked out the key of the Passion narrative in the kingship of Jesus, and has made its meaning clearer, perhaps, than any other New Testament writer” (ibid., p. 531).
Now we must ask: Who exactly were Jesus’ accusers? Who insisted that he be condemned to death? We must take note of the different answers that the Gospels give to this question. According to John it was simply “the Jews”. But John’s use of this expression does not in any way indicate — as the modern reader might suppose — the people of Israel in general, even less is it “racist” in character. After all, John himself was ethnically a Jew, as were Jesus and all his followers. The entire early Christian community was made up of Jews. In John’s Gospel this word has a precise and clearly defined meaning: he is referring to the Temple aristocracy. So the circle of accusers who instigate Jesus’ death is precisely indicated in the Fourth Gospel and clearly limited: it is the Temple aristocracy — and not without certain exceptions, as the reference to Nicodemus (7:50–52) shows.

In Mark’s Gospel, the circle of accusers is broadened in the context of the Passover amnesty (Barabbas or Jesus): the “ochlos” enters the scene and opts for the release of Barabbas. “Ochlos” in the first instance simply means a crowd of people, the “masses”. The word frequently has a pejorative connotation, meaning “mob”. In any event, it does not refer to the Jewish people as such. In the case of the Passover amnesty (which admittedly is not attested in other sources, but even so need not be doubted), the people, as so often with such amnesties, have a right to put forward a proposal, expressed by way of “acclamation”. Popular acclamation in this case has juridical character (cf. Pesch, Markusevangelium II, p. 466). Effectively this “crowd” is made up of the followers of Barabbas who have been mobilized to secure the amnesty for him: as a rebel against Roman power he could naturally count on a good number of supporters. So the Barabbas party, the “crowd”, was conspicuous, while the followers of Jesus remained hidden out of fear; this meant that the vox populi, on which Roman law was built, was represented one-sidedly. In Mark’s account, then, in addition to “the Jews”, that is to say the dominant priestly circle, the ochlos comes into play, the circle of Barabbas’ supporters, but not the Jewish people as such.
An extension of Mark’s ochlos, with fateful consequences, is found in Matthew’s account (27:25), which speaks of “all the people” and attributes to them the demand for Jesus’ crucifixion. Matthew is certainly not recounting historical fact here: How could the whole people have been present at this moment to clamor for Jesus’ death? It seems obvious that the historical reality is correctly described in John’s account and in Mark’s. The real group of accusers are the current Temple authorities, joined in the context of the Passover amnesty by the “crowd” of Barabbas’ supporters.

Here we may agree with Joachim Gnilka, who argues that Matthew, going beyond historical considerations, is attempting a theological etiology with which to account for the terrible fate of the people of Israel in the Jewish War, when land, city, and Temple were taken from them (cf. Matthäusevangelium II, p. 459). Matthew is thinking here of Jesus’ prophecy concerning the end of the Temple: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken . . .” (Mt 23:37–38: cf. Gnilka, Matthäusevangelium, the whole of the section entitled “Gerichtsworte“, II, pp. 295–308).

These words — as argued earlier, in the chapter on Jesus’ eschatological discourse — remind us of the inner similarity between the Prophet Jeremiah’s message and that of Jesus. Jeremiah — against the blindness of the then dominant circles — prophesied the destruction of the Temple and Israel’s exile. But he also spoke of a “new covenant”: punishment is not the last word; it leads to healing. In the same way Jesus prophesies the “deserted house” and proceeds to offer the New Covenant “in his blood”: ultimately it is a question of healing, not of destruction and rejection.

When in Matthew’s account the “whole people” say: “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25), the Christian will remember that Jesus’ blood speaks a different language from the blood of Abel (Heb 12:24): it does not cry out for vengeance and punishment; it brings reconciliation. It is not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God . . . God put [Jesus] forward as an expiation by his blood” (Rom 3:23, 25). Just as Caiaphas’ words about the need for Jesus’ death have to be read in an entirely new light from the perspective of faith, the same applies to Matthew’s reference to blood: read in the light of faith, it means that we all stand in need of the purifying power of love which is his blood. These words are not a curse, but rather redemption, salvation. Only when understood in terms of the theology of the Last Supper and the Cross, drawn from the whole of the New Testament, does this verse from Matthew’s Gospel take on its correct meaning.

Let us move now from the accusers to the judge: the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate. While Flavius Josephus and especially Philo of Alexandria paint a rather negative picture of him, other sources portray him as decisive, pragmatic, and realistic. It is often said that the Gospels presented him in an increasingly positive light out of a politically motivated pro-Roman tendency and that they shifted the blame for Jesus’ death more and more onto the Jews. Yet there were no grounds for any such tendency in the historical circumstances of the evangelists: by the time the Gospels were written, Nero’s persecution had already revealed the cruel side of the Roman State and the great arbitrariness of imperial power. If we may date the Book of Revelation to approximately the same period as John’s Gospel, then it is clear that the Fourth Gospel did not come to be written in a context that could have given rise to a pro-Roman stance.

The image of Pilate in the Gospels presents the Roman Prefect quite realistically as a man who could be brutal when he judged this to be in the interests of public order. Yet he also knew that Rome owed its world dominance not least to its tolerance of foreign divinities and to the capacity of Roman law to build peace. This is how he comes across to us during Jesus’ trial.

The charge that Jesus claimed to be king of the Jews was a serious one. Rome had no difficulty in recognizing regional kings like Herod, but they had to be legitimated by Rome and they had to receive from Rome the definition and limitation of their sovereignty. A king without such legitimation was a rebel who threatened the Pax Romana and therefore had to be put to death.

Pilate knew, however, that no rebel uprising had been instigated by Jesus. Everything he had heard must have made Jesus seem to him like a religious fanatic, who may have offended against some Jewish legal and religious rulings, but that was of no concern to him. The Jews themselves would have to judge that. From the point of view of the Roman juridical and political order, which fell under his competence, there was nothing serious to hold against Jesus.
At this point we must pass from considerations about the person of Pilate to the trial itself. In John 18:34–35 it is clearly stated that, on the basis of the information in his possession, Pilate had nothing that would incriminate Jesus. Nothing had come to the knowledge of the Roman authority that could in any way have posed a risk to law and order. The charge came from Jesus’ own people, from the Temple authority. It must have astonished Pilate that Jesus’ own people presented themselves to him as defenders of Rome, when the information at his disposal did not suggest the need for any action on his part.

Yet during the interrogation we suddenly arrive at a dramatic moment: Jesus’ confession. To Pilate’s question: “So you are a king?” he answers: “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice” ( Jn 18:37). Previously Jesus had said: “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world” (18:36).

This “confession” of Jesus places Pilate in an extraordinary situation: the accused claims kingship and a kingdom (basileía). Yet he underlines the complete otherness of his kingship, and he even makes the particular point that must have been decisive for the Roman judge: No one is fighting for this kingship. If power, indeed military power, is characteristic of kingship and kingdoms, there is no sign of it in Jesus’ case. And neither is there any threat to Roman order. This kingdom is powerless. It has “no legions”.
With these words Jesus created a thoroughly new concept of kingship and kingdom, and he held it up to Pilate, the representative of classical worldly power. What is Pilate to make of it, and what are we to make of it, this concept of kingdom and kingship? Is it unreal, is it sheer fantasy that can be safely ignored? Or does it somehow affect us?

In addition to the clear delimitation of his concept of kingdom (no fighting, earthly powerlessness), Jesus had introduced a positive idea, in order to explain the nature and particular character of the power of this kingship: namely, truth. Pilate brought another idea into play as the dialogue proceeded, one that came from his own world and was normally connected with “kingdom”: namely, power — authority (exousía). Dominion demands power; it even defines it. Jesus, however, defines as the essence of his kingship witness to the truth. Is truth a political category? Or has Jesus’ “kingdom” nothing to do with politics? To which order does it belong? If Jesus bases his concept of kingship and kingdom on truth as the fundamental category, then it is entirely understandable that the pragmatic Pilate asks him: “What is truth?” (18:38).

It is the question that is also asked by modern political theory: Can politics accept truth as a structural category? Or must truth, as something unattainable, be relegated to the subjective sphere, its place taken by an attempt to build peace and justice using whatever instruments are available to power? By relying on truth, does not politics, in view of the impossibility of attaining consensus on truth, make itself a tool of particular traditions that in reality are merely forms of holding on to power?

And yet, on the other hand, what happens when truth counts for nothing? What kind of justice is then possible? Must there not be common criteria that guarantee real justice for all — criteria that are independent of the arbitrariness of changing opinions and powerful lobbies? Is it not true that the great dictatorships were fed by the power of the ideological lie and that only truth was capable of bringing freedom?
What is truth? The pragmatist’s question, tossed off with a degree of scepticism, is a very serious question, bound up with the fate of mankind. What, then, is truth? Are we able to recognize it? Can it serve as a criterion for our intellect and will, both in individual choices and in the life of the community?

The classic definition from scholastic philosophy designates truth as “adaequatio intellectus et rei” (conformity between the intellect and reality; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, a. 2c). If a man’s intellect reflects a thing as it is in itself, then he has found truth: but only a small fragment of reality — not truth in its grandeur and integrity.

We come closer to what Jesus meant with another of Saint Thomas’ teachings: “Truth is in God’s intellect properly and firstly (proprie et primo); in human intellect it is present properly and derivatively (proprie quidem et secundario)” (De Verit., q. 1, a. 4c). And in conclusion we arrive at the succinct formula: God is “ipsa summa et prima veritas” (truth itself, the sovereign and first truth; Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 5c).

This formula brings us close to what Jesus means when he speaks of the truth, when he says that his purpose in coming into the world was to “bear witness to the truth”. Again and again in the world, truth and error, truth and untruth, are almost inseparably mixed together. The truth in all its grandeur and purity does not appear. The world is “true” to the extent that it reflects God: the creative logic, the eternal reason that brought it to birth. And it becomes more and more true the closer it draws to God. Man becomes true, he becomes himself, when he grows in God’s likeness. Then he attains to his proper nature. God is the reality that gives being and intelligibility.

“Bearing witness to the truth” means giving priority to God and to his will over against the interests of the world and its powers. God is the criterion of being. In this sense, truth is the real “king” that confers light and greatness upon all things. We may also say that bearing witness to the truth means making creation intelligible and its truth accessible from God’s perspective — the perspective of creative reason — in such a way that it can serve as a criterion and a signpost in this world of ours, in such a way that the great and the mighty are exposed to the power of truth, the common law, the law of truth.

Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.

At this point, modern man is tempted to say: Creation has become intelligible to us through science. Indeed, Francis S. Collins, for example, who led the Human Genome Project, says with joyful astonishment: “The language of God was revealed” (The Language of God, p. 122). Indeed, in the magnificent mathematics of creation, which today we can read in the human genetic code, we recognize the language of God. But unfortunately not the whole language. The functional truth about man has been discovered. But the truth about man himself — who he is, where he comes from, what he should do, what is right, what is wrong — this unfortunately cannot be read in the same way. Hand in hand with growing knowledge of functional truth there seems to be an increasing blindness toward “truth” itself — toward the question of our real identity and purpose.

What is truth? Pilate was not alone in dismissing this question as unanswerable and irrelevant for his purposes. Today too, in political argument and in discussion of the foundations of law, it is generally experienced as disturbing. Yet if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the stronger. “Redemption” in the fullest sense can only consist in the truth becoming recognizable. And it becomes recognizable when God becomes recognizable. He becomes recognizable in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God entered the world and set up the criterion of truth in the midst of history. Truth is outwardly powerless in the world, just as Christ is powerless by the world’s standards: he has no legions; he is crucified. Yet in his very powerlessness, he is powerful: only thus, again and again, does truth become power.
In the dialogue between Jesus and Pilate, the subject matter is Jesus’ kingship and, hence, the kingship, the “kingdom”, of God. In the course of this same conversation it becomes abundantly clear that there is no discontinuity between Jesus’ Galilean teaching — the proclamation of the kingdom of God — and his Jerusalem teaching. The center of the message, all the way to the Cross — all the way to the inscription above the Cross — is the kingdom of God, the new kingship represented by Jesus. And this kingship is centered on truth. The kingship proclaimed by Jesus, at first in parables and then at the end quite openly before the earthly judge, is none other than the kingship of truth. The inauguration of this kingship is man’s true liberation.

At the same time it becomes clear that between the pre-Resurrection focus on the kingdom of God and the post-Resurrection focus on faith in Jesus Christ as Son of God there is no contradiction. In Christ, God — the Truth — entered the world. Christology is the concrete form acquired by the proclamation of God’s kingdom.
After the interrogation, Pilate knew for certain what in principle he had already known beforehand: this Jesus was no political rebel; his message and his activity posed no threat for the Roman rulers. Whether Jesus had offended against the Torah was of no concern to him as a Roman.

Yet Pilate seems also to have experienced a certain superstitious wariness concerning this remarkable figure. True, Pilate was a sceptic. As a man of his time, though, he did not exclude the possibility that gods or, at any rate, god-like beings could take on human form. John tells us that “the Jews” accused Jesus of making himself the Son of God, and then he adds: “When Pilate heard these words, he was even more afraid” (19:8).

I think we must take seriously the idea of Pilate’s fear: Perhaps there really was something divine in this man? Perhaps Pilate would be opposing divine power if he were to condemn him? Perhaps he would have to reckon with the anger of the deity? I think his attitude during the trial can be explained not only on the basis of a certain commitment to see justice done, but also on the basis of such considerations as these.

Jesus’ accusers obviously realize this, and so they now play off one fear against another. Against the superstitious fear of a possible divine presence, they appeal to the entirely practical fear of forfeiting the emperor’s favor, being removed from office, and thus plunging into a downward spiral. The declaration: “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend” ( Jn 19:12) is a threat. In the end, concern for career proves stronger than fear of divine powers.

Interview: Marie Howe poet and teacher

by Peter Menkin

This interview with Marie Howe, American poet and teacher, is the first of a series of three different interviews with American poets. Note some poems by Marie from her new book “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time,” are included in the Addendum to the interview—by permission of the poet, and of W.W. Norton publisher. The new book can be bought through the internet at this address. To contact the poet with an interest in a speaking engagement, go here. To write the poet, do so in care of her agent for speaking engagements whose email is here. Marie writes poetry of religious and spiritual kind, and other works most lovely and engaged in what one critic called the metaphysical. There is a lot of love in her work.

1.      Marie I am so glad you’ve agreed to an interview. Let me indulge myself by a quote from another interview you gave, for it offers a lovely poem you wrote mentioning Jesus Christ:

Marie: Sure, let me see. It’s funny; Jesus shows up in this book a lot.  There’s a  poem here called “The Star Market” that I’d love to read.

A lot of what is throughout this book is that Jesus said “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” — What does that mean, the kingdom of heaven is within each of us?  And if the kingdom of heaven is within us, who governs there? Really? How do we govern ourselves? That’s another poem called “Government,” but maybe I’ll just read this  poem called “The Star Market.”

“The people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Market yesterday. /An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout. /Breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps. //Even after his bags were packed he still stood, Breathing hard and /hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them: /Shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, As if The Star Market //had declared a day off for the able-bodied, And I had wandered in /with the rest of them, sour milk, bad meat, /looking for cereal and spring water. //Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, Looking for my lost car/ in the parking lot later, Stumbling among the people. Who would have/ been lowered into rooms by ropes, Who would have crept //out of caves, Or crawled from the corners of public baths. On their hands /and knees begging for mercy. //If I touch only the hem of his garment, One woman thought, I will be healed /Could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?”

In a well liked online magazine of interviews with artists and such, Marie had this to say and though it is apparent in the interview of this writer’s that starts below that Marie Howe has developed themes in her work, and in the maturity of her thought as a poet in that interview, the “Bomb” interview enriches this article:

VR An interesting shift in the structures between The Good Thiefand What The Living Do is that you drop the voices of Biblical mythology and let actual people, the actual people of Marie Howe’s life, enter the poems. Brothers, friends, lovers, grade school kids. It is a very brave leap to include all the names. The actual people are all that is needed for a mythology.
MH I love the characters in the Old and New Testaments, they were the stories of my childhood. I was one of those girls who read The Lives of the Saints in the bathtub‚ and through those stories I tried to figure out how to live. Abraham’s decision, Noah’s task, Moses’s stutter and exasperation, all helped me feel less embarrassed to be human—as did Mary Magdalene’s passionate love, Peter’s impulsiveness, and Jesus’s anger. I’m still in love with both Martha and Mary. They’re the only two who show up in the new book—and why wouldn’t they? Martha, the active: Mary, the contemplative. The wrestling aspects of a woman writer.
…
MH I think time is a lie. John used to say to me, “Maria, it’s not linear, it’s circular.” I think I know what he meant. What the Christians call “The Fullness of Time.” It feels truer to me. That sense that time past and time future are present in now and always have been.
The poems I love most, and learn from are the poems that are written from that place: Rilke, Hopkins, Herbert, Jane Kenyon’s poems, Brenda Hillman, Jean Valentine—but there are so many.
It’s been eight years since The Good Thief was published, and for some time I felt ashamed that it was taking me so long to finish, to write the second book. Now I know that whatever had me in its mouth has its own time and terms.

“This interview, Marie Howe by Victoria Redel,” was commissioned by and first published in BOMB magazine, Issue #61, Fall 1997 pp. 66070 Copyright Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors, All rights reserved. The BOMB Digital Archive can be viewed at www.bombsite.com .

2.      My question to start is this…What in the Bible that has a poetic sense captures your own attention as a poet? And I know there is so much in the Bible that holds a poetic sense for you and many people. Just tell us what you’re thinking these days.

There’s the rhythm, there’s the musicality of the Old Testament. What I love of both the Old and New Testaments are the stories. The stories are depicted as all action, without explanation. And in that way, they are like poems. I love the silence surrounding the action of the stories: Cain and Able, the Binding of Isaac,  the flood: all those stories move me very much–in the way they’re told…as stories about humans in particular. I love in Job when the voice from the whirlwind comes out. What could be more gorgeous than the words of the whirlwind? There are astonishing questions asked of Job. It may be one of the most beautiful things I’ve read.

I am not interested in rating the stories.

3.      Stanley Kunitz was one of your favorite and most influential teachers, if not the most influential you’ve said. Here is a quote he offered about your work: Stanley Kunitz for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize in 1988. Kunitz said, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”

Please tell us what it means for you to have an influential teacher who moves you, and as I understand it was something of a mentor. Tell us what it means to you, “mentoring” and more significantly, what it is to have or have had a mentor?

That is a word I did not associate with Stanley. Other people use that word. Stanley was my friend. I was 33 years old when I met him, and we were friends for 25 years. What I love…what Stanley had…was as a great influence on me…as friends do. He would look at my poems yes of course .   But  What he did indelibly was to live in the world. Stanley was a man who was fully alive, all the time. And attentive to the moment he was living in. This was 1983.

It means exactly what it says, to be awake to the moment you’re in and the moment of living. It was a great pleasure to be with…to travel with him, and be with him and he would get great delight in cheese and crackers…he enjoyed everything so much. He loved stories and everything so much. He didn’t live to be 101 (and not)…he didn’t say how good things used to be.

4.      Here is another of those, What do you think of that kind of questions. First some context for the question: In 2009  the Boston Review said this of your work:

Several of Howe’s poems are explicitly religious, but if the Gospels loom large in them, they are never simplistic or pious: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, / Jesus said. . . . The kingdom of heaven / is within you. . . . That’s the good news / and the bad news, isn’t it?” Howe’s poems manage to be both complex and accessible; they provide pleasure and provoke: “What would we be willing to give up to equalize the wealth in the world?” The Kingdom of Ordinary Time confirms Howe’s position as one of the finer, most serious-minded poets of her generation.

Is that a kind of off-putting remark? What I am getting at is how does one react to these remarks of your importance: “…most serious-minded poets of her generation…” How can someone react to such kudos, and importantly for our readers, does this kind of thing help you or turn your head, or help you along the way? Since we say we’re glad to have you for your wonderful poetry, we hope remarks of praise are helpful.

I don’t read reviews of my own books. I don’t want to…it’s not my business as a poet to know what others think. I’d rather live life and write the next poem. It has nothing to do with my work. I think poetry is a vocation, not a career.

5.      When we spoke originally, and I am so glad to make your acquaintance as you know, we talked about young people. Will you talk a little bit to young people, high schoolers and below, about writing poetry. What can they look for to gain or gather a poetic sense, even if they never write a word—but let us hope they will.

Poetry is the deepest song of the human soul. It’s our original art, and it helps us with our life. We need to hear the voices. We need to write as we please and as we can. The truth of what it is to be alive and on this earth.

6.      Tell us a little bit about the school where you teach, and something of your students. For instance, what are they most interested in these days?  Is there something that catches their imagination, or inspires them? Do they think anything of your religious expression in your work?

There are unprecedented numbers of young people coming into tables to write and speak about poetry. It’s wonderful, and I think that…the numbers are unprecedented. Every kind of poetry is interesting; their excited about outloud, on paper writing about metric and line.

7.      Those are the questions I have for you. If there is anything not covered, or you want to say something more, please do.

I wanted the poems to speak to people who might think they don’t understand poetry. I feel that many of them were intentionally estranged from poetry in high school and college. I wanted to write in a voice that is ordinary for us. I want people to believe that more–more poetry belongs to them. They really don’t need a teacher. There is nothing they need to do but know that what they do is bring to the poem themselves. That most people can bring themselves to a poem. They don’t need to feel afraid of them or feel that they can’t read it.

ADDENDUM

Notes from Sara Lawrence

Marie Howe is the author of, most recently, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time(March 2008, WW Norton), What The Living Do (1998, WW Norton) as well asThe Good Thief (1987, Persea Books), selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. She is the editor, with Michael Klein, of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She has received numerous awards including the Mary Ingram Bunting fellowship from Radcliffe College and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Guggenheim. She is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Poetry Workshop

Marie Howe

Level: Open

Semester: Spring

This is a reading/writing course. We will spend time every week reading poems that have already been published, so that we can see how they were made: music, syntax, line, sound, and image. We might spend time generating new work in class through exercises and experiments. And we will spend time looking closely at one another’s work, encouraging one another to take risks and to move even closer to the sources of our poems. Each writer in the class will meet with another class member once a week in a “poetry date.” Each writer will be responsible for reading the assigned work and for bringing to class one written offering each week. We will work hard, learn a great deal about poetry and about our own poems, and have a wonderful time.

Open to any interested student.

THE POEMS

Mary (Reprise)

What is that book we always see—in the paintings—in her lap?

Her finger keeping the place of who she was when she looked up?

When I look up: my mother is dead, and my own daughter is calling,

From the bathtub, Mom come in and watch me—come in here right now!

No Going Back might be the name of that Angel—no more reverie.

Let it ber done to me, Mary finally said, and that

Was the last time, for a long time, that she spoke about the past.

Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store

And the gas station and the green market and

Hurry up honey, I say, hurry hurry,

As she runs along two or three steps behind me

Her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want to hurry to? To her grave?

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,

Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—

You walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking

Back at me, laughting. Hurry up now darling, she says,

Hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

Ordinary Time

A Thurrsday—no—a Friday someone said.

What year was it?

Just after the previous age ended, it began.

And although the scientists still studied the heavens

And the stars blazed—if the evening wasn’t cloudy—

What happened did not occur in public view.

Some said it simply didn’t happen, although others insisted they knew

All about it

And made many intricate plans.

The Snow Storm

I walked down towards the river, and the deer had left tracks

Deep as half my arm, that ended in a perfect hoof

And the shump shump sound my boots made walking made the silence loud.

And when I turned back towards the great house

I walked beside the deer tracks again.

And when I came near the feeder: little tracks of the birds on the surface

Of the snow I’d broken through.

Put your finger her, and see my hands, then bring your hand and put it in my side.

I put my hand down into the deer track

And touched bottom of an invisible hoof.

Then my finger in the little mark of the jay.

MORE POEMS

Prayer

Someone or something is leaning close to me now
trying to tell me the one true story of my life:

one note,
low as a bass drum, beaten over and over:

It’s beginning summer,
and the man I love has forgotten my smell

the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter
when he picked me up

and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down,
among the scattered daffodils on the dining room table.

And Jane is dead,
and I want to go where she went,
where my brother went,

and whoever it is that whispered to me

when I was a child in my father’s bed is come back now:
and I can’t stop hearing
This is the way it is,
the way it always was and will be—

beaten over and over—panicking in street comers,
or crouched in the back of taxicabs,

afraid I’ll cry out in jammed traffic, and no one will know me
or know where to bring me

There it is, I almost remember,
another story:

It runs along this one like a brook beside a train.
The sparrow knows it, the grass rises with it.

The wind moves through the highest tree branches without
seeming to hurt them.

Tell me.
Who was I when I used to call your name?

[Reprinted from What the Living Do (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999)]

Once or Twice or Three Times, I Saw Something

Once ot twice or three times, I saw something

Rise from the dust in the yard, like the soul

Of the dust, or from the field, he soul-body

Of the field—rise and hover like a veil in the sun

Billowing—as if I could see the wind itself.

I thought I did it—squinting—but I didn’t.

As if the edges of things blurred—so what was in

Bled out, breathed up and mingled, bush and cow

And dust and well: breathed a field I walked through

Waist high, as through high grass or water, my fingers

Swirling through it—or it through me. I saw it.

It was thing and spirit both: the real

World: evident, invisible.

Marie Howe at the NYS Writers Institute in 2008

Images: (1) Marie Howe, photo by Brad Fowler